Huh. Another Dusapin. I wasn't overly taken with his Macbeth Underworld, but evidently I thought this would be worth seeing anyway. Well, I was looking up Georg Nigl, who played the male lead in Von heute auf morgen, and the wikipedia entry said that he was known for creating the title role in this opera. So I idly looked it up, found a youtube video (which, yes, features Nigl in the lead--recognizably the same guy, even in such a wildly different role) and just impulsively decided to check it out. What more can I say?
This is not the Faust story as you'd get it from Berlioz or Gounod or Boito: it's a very stripped-down, intentionally abstruse thing. That video is unsubtitled, so even though it's in English, a lot of it was very hard to follow, but I don't get the impression that I would likely have been able to make much more sense of it even with subtitles. The whole thing--in this production, anyway--takes place with the characters--Faustus, Mephistopheles, an angel, and a few other characters whose purpose is not entirely clear--clambering around a giant clock face. This may be the last night, but it's not clear whether time is actually passing. There's not much action; Faustus grills Mephistopheles a lot about light and about the nature of the universe. Which, hey, gives him a step up over the character as portrayed in other versions, who, in spite of allegedly having sold his soul for knowledge, basically just idly dicks around. Mephistopheles--who is made up to look almost identical to Faustus--seems rattled and uncertain at his questions. You really do have to wonder about this world's cosmology.
I feel that this sounds pretty similar to Macbeth Underworld, from what I can remember. I think I like this one more, though. It definitely has that eerie, atmospheric feel to it. Wouldn't mind seeing it again with subs for greater comprehension.
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